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(1931–),

graduate of Princeton, where he has occasionally taught journalism, became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1965. For its “Profiles” he has written on such diverse people as a professional basketball player from Princeton, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, championship tennis stars, and a nuclear physicist, all reissued as books. His short books on natural history include Oranges (1967), on the botany, history, and industry of the fruit; The Pine Barrens (1968), about a wilderness area of New Jersey; The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975); and the more substantial Coming into the Country (1977), about Alaska, Basin and Range (1981), studying the geology of the Utah-California region, and La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984), about the Swiss army. These works too were first printed in The New Yorker.